Excerpt from A Selection From the Poems of Giosue Carducci

This attempt to represent some of the poems of Giosuè Carducci in English verse has not been made without consideration of the objections urged by many critics against this form of translation and of the advantages of greater facility and literalness possible to a prose version. But while prose may fairly render dramatic and even narrative verse, it seems to me absolutely impossible to produce in that medium the effect of lyrical poetry. The one violates the canons of the other.

No one can be better aware than I am myself of how far my translation falls short of the beauty of the original. My aim has been to give as literal a rendering as the exigencies of metrical forms would allow. I have also endeavoured to keep as close as I could to those used by Carducci. I have found the unrhymed metres more difficult to reproduce in English than the rhymed, and have allowed myself more licence than is perhaps permissible in the attempt to imitate classical measures, but I have some justification in the practice of Carducci himself and in the introductory remark on the versification prefixed to the Odi Barbare, which I may here quote, substituting English for Italian. He calls them barbarous "because such they would seem to the judgment of the Greeks and Romans, although they arc intended to be composed in the metrical forms of their lyrics, and because they will sound barbarous to the ears of many an Englishman, even though composed and harmonized in English verse depending upon accent." (Preface to Odi Barbare.)

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